(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady (3 page)

In those days, Mount Vernon used to have a traveling summer tent show called “The Kinsey Komedy.” So I called mine “The Crazy Quincy Comedy.” We did that in style with my brother on a red wagon with a wind-up Victrola shouting out, “Come to Quincy’s Crazy Comedy.” This was a money-making proposition. The neighbors would come and I would charge them a penny (certainly not over-priced). Invariably, right in the middle of the show, my mother would interrupt with, “There’s no time for frivolity. There’s a lot of work to be done.” That was really dashing cold water on gaiety. However, when I checked with Agnes about her childhood, she was doing practically the same thing, playing out parts, living out fantasies. However, in her case, her parents would always say, ‘How brilliant you are, Agnes. Who are you today?” She’d tell them she was Alice in Wonderland and they would help set the scene for her. They played along with her desire to change a rather dull world into a bright fantasy one.

Many stars in Hollywood started with their love for the screen and stage to do little playlets as children. Mae West, another great idol of mine who I came to know well (she liked and accepted a Christmas song I had been trying to peddle for twenty years and recorded it for her Christmas album; it was called ‘Put the Loot in the Boot, Santa”), told me stories with great enthusiasm of how she had stood before her mirror as a child and made faces at herself and tried out different voices and ways of saying words, moving around, as she said, “just to see what it felt like.” But again, in her case, her parents encouraged her creativity. They wanted their daughter to play make-believe and, out of that fantasy, they created reality. These girls grew up to be big stars.

Just as it seems to my Jungian—bent mind, every great idea we’ve ever had has come out of a dream or a fantasy, I think, perhaps if my fantasies weren’t smothered, I might have become a great actor. As it was, I became a satellite to the planet. They almost faded out until my association with Agnes brought my love of the stage back into light, the light of reality.

Agnes was very shrewd in her operation of manipulation. It was actually selfish on her part, but she wanted me to have a great feeling for her work and thereby help her. Yet, in doing so, as she put it, “I helped you realize some of your deep fantasies.’ This inspiration cultivated my talent, gave me prestige, introduced me to new worlds of success and incorporated me into a creative future. Actually, she instilled so much feeling in me with her creative force that I was able, during the peak of her career (which I believe was “Bewitched”), ultimately to help her consummate her oldest fantasy cherished through the years: that of rebuilding her childhood farmhouse despite exhaustion, lawsuits, unexpected oil wells and everything else. As for “Bewitched”, she had ambivalent feelings about her climb to fame through a TV series. It was motion pictures she looked on so fondly and which made her reputation, the biggest “A” movies and the biggest parts. Yet those who met her on the street knew her only as Endora on “Bewitched”, and that’s the irony of show business.

But I stray from my true inspiration and that was seeing “Doc” Stone, my doctor and my mentor. During his course of treatments, I recalled and related the past to him just as I have on the previous pages. He had inspired me to try again to work on it and under his guidance I took responsibility for some of the original repression of, and now recovery of, my happiness. He said, “We never seem to have enjoyed the experience of discovery.” I objected to that and told him what love I had, as a child, for show business and how I made little stages and all about my imaginative shows, the windows, the drapes, the intricate lighting and the curtain going up. I must have had enthusiasm in my voice and lights in my eyes because he loved it. He even tried to penetrate the intimacy of my feeling for each little character I invented. He said, “You seem to have a flair for that sort of thing.” And then angrily he said, “Why in the devil aren’t you doing something about it?” Naively I asked, ‘Like what?” “Well, why don’t you try acting? You need something you let go of as a child. Something in you has been snuffed out. Revive it. Acting might be the way to rekindle that flame.” I agreed, but I was both excited and frightened, yet he had motivated me. It took someone outside my own shambles to do it. The first step was looking for an acting school. Now I had the enthusiasm to keep moving further. I checked into several at once and didn’t like any of them. They just seemed interested in my money. Then a friend asked, “Why don’t you go to Agnes Moorehead?”

I have a way to improve your lot in life, to make it happier, to make your existence fuller. Take one person you admire and, whether you’re close or far away, mold yourself to their image. Understand them and enjoy them and let a lot of their glamour and expertise and activity wear off on you. It’s what I eventually did with Agnes Moorehead. Of course, it started accidentally, but it developed and I became close to her for many years through my persistence and adoration. Anyone could do it, either up close or from a distance. It’s a way of leading two lives and a definite plus for happiness.

So, I found out Agnes Moorehead had an acting school. Though it had, been going for some time and had become popular, I couldn’t find it. But somehow, that particular school stuck in my mind. I had never consciously been an avid fan of Agnes Moorehead. She was one of many stars I admired. But, in my subconscious, I did remember as a kid in high school listening to her do “Sorry, Wrong Number” on the Suspense radio show and she got to me. I was terrified. Being a movie—television—radio fan, I knew she had done loads of radio plays and I had read that she was a co-founder and charter member of the Mercury Theatre Players with Orson Welles and I had listened to that every time I could. In fact, the whole family would sit and listen to it. I didn’t know it was her movie debut at the time, but later found out her debut was in “Citizen Kane.” She was brilliant on the screen, as brilliant as she was in other media.

After that, she did “The Magnificent Ambersons” that brought her her first Academy Award nomination and the New York Critics Award for Best Actress of the Year. And then there was “Raintree County which I loved and “Jane Eyre” and “Mrs. Parkington.” I found out later she loved “Mrs. Parkington.” It was her favorite film role. She had wanted it as soon as she had heard they were going to make the picture and she fought to get it. The reason is that she’d been playing a series of neurotic or mousy women and she wanted to do something different. This was an expensive showcase film and the part she would be playing had a grandeur and a glamour that allowed her to show her warm, beautiful, insightful, loving, moral, feminine side of herself. She played it magnificently and it won her an Academy Award nomination. And I couldn’t forget “Johnny Belinda” for which she got another nomination. And she played “Caged” and ‘Show Boat”, also “How the West Was Won.” And then there was the TV series “Bewitched” which is still in reruns. She was crazy about it and it made a big impact on her public.

For my favorite, she did a “Twilight Zone” which was exquisite. She played the most awful, ghastly woman and for twenty-five minutes in pantomime she was brilliant. No dialogue. I went to see her several times as the slovenly housekeeper in “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte.” For that she got another Oscar nomination. This picture showed how versatile she could be, from queenly to slovenly. Though she wasn’t a beauty when you first looked at her, as so many women aren’t, once you got used to that face, she was gorgeous. She was full of expression and light. She could play beautiful women and she could play ugly, horrible women, and deranged murderesses and, of course in “Bewitched’, a mischievous witch. And how she could play tragedy! She could hold an audience spellbound and, on the other end of the spectrum, could play a great comedienne. She often played off such greats as Fred Allen, Phil Baker, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Bert Lahr, and Bea Lillie. Sometimes I thought comedy was her forte. She could do anything insane, absurd, the wilder the better, the more eccentric the funnier. She and I both loved bizarre humor, ostentatious, flamboyant. And Agnes on stage, and later in person, fit into that perfectly. Her voices, the nuances of pictures were full of ham, beautiful, funny ham. She was animated and I loved animated people. I’d watch her and think, “That’s me.” I was living through her now. I wanted to be that way all my life and people called me a crazy nut when I talked about it and that made me feel guilty.

Later I learned what everyone could learn, that someone who’s so adept at playing a part in front of a camera can do it in real life, too. She actually taught those around her how to act in public, how to play parts. It was a unique talent to be able to pass on her own talents. She was the epitome of a good actress and she made everyone around her love to be around. I know “Bewitched’ was frivolous but she made the most out of it. The proof is that it made a fortune over the years. I became a fan of hers through all the TV, movies and radio shows I heard with her in them.

So I was looking for a school which was not listed anywhere. I saw her on a talk show where she talked about her school but never talked about where it was. I began using the usual methods of finding something. I started calling people. I had the determination and enthusiasm to find that school. I wanted to meet her. I had this tremendous motivation and drive. I checked the Yellow Pages and the trade papers and called everyone everywhere. Everyone knew she had a school but didn’t know how to find it. I called people in the theatre. No soap. I called agents. Even her own agent didn’t know where the school was. It took me three months of activity before I tracked her down. By a stroke of luck, someone gave me a name who introduced me to this one and this one like a chain and it ended with Kathy Ellis who was Agnes Moorehead’s stand-in. I called her. Kathy told me what I had to do for the audition. Five minutes of whatever I wanted, a monologue. I needed to know more. I pressed her for some kind of clue. What did Miss Moorehead like? She thought a while and said, “Well, something original.” When I think back on that conversation, I blush. I was so excited and demanding that I was probably a pain to her.

I felt, at that time, that my whole life depended on my finding the right material to audition for Agnes Moorehead’s acting class. It’s strange how one becomes involved in some minute part of their life and loses sight of all the rest of it. I worked for days trying to find the right thing. In and out of book stores, magazines, agents. At that time I was mainly a singer. Worst of all, I was an actor who could not remember dialogue. I’d been in it too short a time. I always had a photographic memory except for scripts which tells the irony of it. With songs I was terrific, but how could I do a whole five-minute monologue? It completely stopped me and I knew how selective she was. The business of my trying to find the school was proof of that. She never advertised, was practically invisible. Years later she would say to me, her voice cracking on her high, sliding, sagacious pitch, “if people want to find me, they do!’ So I talked around with my friends, my singing coach, the people I knew and I thought I came up with just the right thing, a compromise which really suited me: the soliloquy from “Carousel.” would do it as a monologue. I had a good instinct for it. Instantly I knew she would like it.

I can’t begin to tell you the tremendous pains I took with it. I begged people to work with me because I was confused and didn’t know exactly what I was doing, where the accenting belonged, what to play up and what to play down. I was scared to death. I rehearsed it but froze, tried it this way and that and I did it for friends, too. Soon, with everyone chipping in with their own opinion, I was more confused than ever. Worse than that, I was sick with fear. But at the bottom of all the fear, there was one thing in my favor that made me feel better. I heard somewhere that Agnes liked clean-cut types. That bill I knew I fit in. I was old “goody two-shoes” in person.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE AUDITION

The day finally came around. Finally it was time to go, to do it. I got into my beat-up old jalopy and drove out to meet Agnes Moorehead, frightened and confused, delighted and hopeful, smug and anxious, in my neatly pressed grey slacks, counting on them and my blue cashmere sweater and Catholic face and rearing. I had the copy of the soliloquy from “Carousel’ in my hand. I spotted the building and parked. This was it, live or die, starve or not. This was it, do or die, sink or swim, make it or not. The small car lot was full. I supposed the other cars belonged to her students. The theatre workshop was located in the basement of the Sutro Investment Building, down a few flat, winding stairs that led to small interconnecting patios amidst lots of greenery. It was a strange location and place for such a big star and a bigger talent. I shivered in joy at the whole sight. I also loved the foliage. The whole area was quaint and charming and so like what I imagined she might surround herself with where she would ideally conduct an acting school even though the school itself was conducted in the basement of an investment firm. It was rented out for various business meetings and lectures and other non-theatrical events. I waited. I sat in the patio on a wrought—iron chair and a round matching table and, absorbing the sun, tried desperately to quiet my nerves. It would have taken eighty-five sedatives to do that! I was plugged into electricity.

At last the students poured from the basement and left. School was out. I got up and went to the door of the basement and looked in. I found myself at a side entrance that opened onto what was really just a blank room with folding chairs and two steps leading up to a small stage and a little curtain. Two women sat in the front row of the “theatre. It really was a kind of meeting room. I saw them from the back, two heads of red-orange hair. One was toned down. The other was a wild, brilliant, crazy, blazing orange. No red about it. That’s what hit me, an excitement as burning and outrageous as Agnes Moorehead’s hair. But it was the other woman who turned and saw me.

Kathy Ellis was an attractive woman about twenty-five years Agnes’ junior and the spitting image of Agnes. Perhaps that’s why she was Agnes’ stand-in. She cheerfully came over and introduced herself. She said imperiously, “you can call me Kathy.’ She smiled but there was something charming about her. She was a very sweet woman, very warm, exactly as she had sounded over the telephone when she arranged for the audition. Now my nerves were really on end. I paced. I waited another fifteen minutes or so in the patio while other people auditioned.

Then Kathy came out to get me. She took me inside to Agnes who was very straight, no-nonsense back, who strode toward us and, I thought, each step bringing me closer. There she is, this great woman in the flesh, Agnes Moorehead. Just then she turned with deliberation and looked me over and I thought, “My God” I was shocked. She looked just like my mother with that red-orange hair and her authoritarian grand-dame ass, but she’s alive, creative. It was just a faint thought disappearing almost instantly in the tremendous clouds of confusion and excitement. I was stricken, blinded, not only by the force of her sheer physical presence and my imagination, but by the shockingly vivid plumage of her costume and it very definitely was a costume, a pungent lavender suit and boots (lavender was her favorite color). Lavender and shades of mauve always made up the basic colors in her wardrobe, in her house, everything, including her suitcases. Her hair really was, up close, a flaming, wild orange fire. I’d never seen anything like it and her steel blue eyes flashing brilliantly beneath long, thick black lashes and lavender-come-green-come-blue shadowed lids, her lips painted a glaring red, her whole face half lost in giant, round, purple-bluish, tinted, lavender-framed, goggle-eyed glasses. The whole thing was just so gaudy and intimidating. Here was a woman who knew what she was about and who knew she knew it, a woman in control whose fabulously wrinkled face, as I stopped before her, screwed up into a holy shrug. I would never meet another woman like this in my lifetime and never have met one.

I was awed, overwhelmed, stalled. Her expression seemed to sigh with exquisitely dramatic distain. “Well, here comes another one. I suppose I must sit through it.” I said, “Hello” and the word actually came out. I introduced myself. As she regarded me, one of her heavily freckled hands, both age spots and freckles went to her cheek, an introspective gesture, and I noticed she wore a ring with what looked like an enormous blue star sapphire set in it. It must have been worth a fortune. I said “hello’ again and she said, sitting there, the grand lady, the dowager dragon of the theatre with her perforating voice, her chin lifted and strained, authoritative judgment as she appraised my soul through her lavender goggle-framed lenses, “helllooo.’ She looked like she did belong on a broomstick. That was her first impression. She was a witch, but a glamorous witch in a crust played to the hilt. She played that thing on stage and often and, though I was frightened, I loved it, her belligerent barracuda style, her gargoyle demeanor. She looked something like a cross between “The Mad Woman of Chaillot” and Lady Macbeth and I knew it was one of the most important days of my life.

Frightened but mildly victorious, I went up to the little stage and announced my selection for the audition. It was the first reaction I got from her. I saw her brows arch with interest. It was the only feeling she showed during the whole audition and I was a nervous wreck trying to concentrate on my singing. Through so many thoughts, feelings, mass confusion, I was in the pan, I was on the firing line. I was a mess and she was emotionless. I did the scene for her, watching her throughout the performance. I played it right to her though there was never another flicker of feeling on her face. Finally, when it was over, I went up to her, shaking and sweating a little. She said, nodding autocratically like a school marm or a nun, “That was a very unusual piece you chose. I liked it.” My God! A compliment from Agnes Moorehead! I was overwhelmed, overcome, delighted. In this sense I was relieved, overjoyed. It was nice to know I’d been right about that. But she never said anything about me, that I was good, I wasn’t good, I needed work. Nothing. She liked what I had chosen Instead, as I burned with desire for some recognition as an actor, she added, “I like the way you are dressed. You are very well groomed. I like that in people.” This seemed to me avoiding the issue and she was so definite about it. She liked my clean-cutness more than anything, so much that she promptly launched into a ten-minute verbal, philosophical barrage on the slovenliness of today’s actors and you have to be clean and professional and so forth. Then she nodded her head cackling, “Thank you.” She rose and left. Gone. Forever, I wondered? Mine had been the last audition. “Well,” I said to myself, ‘it’s sink or swim, Quincy.”

Kathy came over to see me. “Well,” she said, “you’ve done very well.’ I was thrilled, but this was coming from her, not from Agnes, though I believed they had some discussion as to any audition. Agnes remained distant, silent. It was part of her aura. She acted like a mother hen who never got too close to her chicks, me being one of the chicks. “Tell you what,” Kathy said, “why don’t you begin the following Saturday? Be here at nine o’clock sharp ‘cause Agnes likes punctuality.” She went on a great deal to tell me a little about the school and the operation of it. She walked, with presence, to join Agnes, and they walked out. I was alone. I stood looking around the empty basement with growing exultation. By the time I emerged from the theatre onto the sunlit patio, I was shaking, overwhelmed. Through the foliage I glimpsed Agnes’ lavender suit sweeping up the curving steps and onto the parking lot which was above me, empty now but for one car. There, Kathy taking the wheel, Agnes beside her now, the classic Thunderbird, purring, took off, its vibrant lavender (wouldn’t you know it?) flashing in the sun and I stared after it awhile behind me.

The basement of the Sutro Building marked the beginning in the landscape of my new life. That basement. It was a clue to, and a symbol of, Agnes which, even through my star-struck haze, I contemplated. “Why, I said to myself, “couldn’t someone with Agnes Moorehead’s luminous prestige and with all her friends in the theatre, find some place better than this dinky if charming rented basement for her acting school?” It was a proposition that would take me a good year to answer in concrete terms, being the one person who would get her that better place. But even after that, Sutro’s would linger in my memory with the other symbols of Agnes’ varied life. But that morning in Sutro’s patio I was only the gawking, glitter-eyed fan and she was my heroine before whose fame, whose history, whose sheer presence my jaw dropped in awe—struck wonder. She was the star, the goddess, an august undeniable force in a regal lavender aura and since lavender is the color of fantasy in Savin’s psychological tests, it should come as no surprise that it was not Agnes herself but the myth of the Lavender Lady that first devastated me with enchantment.

They say people’s lives go in seven-year cycles. I didn’t count, but this certainly was the start of a new cycle. The school was called TAFI (Theatrical And Film Instruction). It ran from September, which it was then, to the spring.

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